Friday, September 23, 2011

This was going to be my Video Of The Week last week, but time and life got out of hand, I fell ill for 4 days (and still feeling the after-effects) and, well, now we're this week's Friday.

The story for this one started a week ago, maybe two, when the former Lady Of The House saw my friend Mark coming out of a Pizza Pizza from the bus she was in, then told me at night, prompting me to email him ''hey, my spies saw you coming out of a Pizza Pizza, Big Brother's watching'' and, you know, this song came to mind.

Plus, we were due for some cheese, some Rockwell and some Michael Jackson (his cousin helping out on backing vocals).

First of all, thank you ABC News for forgoing the stuff everybody else is covering like Mahmoud Abbas at the UN, the Iraq or Afghan wars, the stupidity of the Republican nominees, the cancellation of the NBA preseason or corruption in politics to instead focus on a story about a cat.

Someone has to do the human interest stories. Kudos.

It's a wonderful story about a cat who disappeared from its Colorado home 5 years ago and was found in the streets of New York City - of all places!

Except they re-acquainted the cat with the family after reading a chip in the cat. The fucking cat was fucking chipped as a kitten, and now this family is on the Today Show saying shit like ''everybody should chip their fucking cat in case this happens''... everybody should chip their fucking cat? What's next - chipping your kids?

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Sure, historically, the American minstrel shows have pretty much tarnished 'blackface' forever by depicting African-Americans as lazy, stupid, ignorant and party-heavy, from the 1830s until the 1910s in public performances, pehaps until the 1950s in some informal, unprofessional gatherings (high schools, local Southern theaters).

But, first and foremost, actual minstrels were bards who just sang songs in medieval Europe. From the fifth century (year 400) on. Halfway between Shakespeare and buskers.

More importantly, though, Canada has never dealt with the U.S.-type of racism, segregation and, by the board, U.S.-type minstrel shows. Québec even less.

For roughly 300 years, French and English people invaded North America and had disputes over territories. Both white peoples. In 1763, France decided to let their North American colonies rot and fend for themselves, perhaps even die and by 1867 Canada was born, consisting of four provinces, including the pretty much exclusively French (and Aboriginals) Québec.

From the very beginning but even more so from 1867 onwards, Québec politics have involved the discussion of whether it should secede from Canada, largely for language and culture issues, but perhaps more importantly from being a dominion of the United Kingdom - an independence the United States declared in 1776 (which the U.K. accepted in 1883). To this day, Canada still isn't sovereign, as can be attested by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's recent decision to render the military back to its ''Royal'' affiliations and denominations.

For more than a century, Québec politicians - with decades-long help from the Catholic Church - have been more involved with trying to keep their culture alive than anything else, so any issue with ''foreigners'' has never been about a colour conflict but more about a language one; black people in Québec were never seen as a threat if they could speak French: they were allies. It is for that reason that Québec immigration, for years, targeted Haitians, Russians, Arabs, Western Europeans: they spoke a variant of French as a first or second language and could be integrated into the society almost immediately, making more of ''us'' against less of ''them''.

Over time, even anglophone Quebecers' views on progressive subjects such as Human Rights (here perceived more as Womens' and Gays' rights than separated by skin colour), war, social security and welfare, have come to closely resemble that of their francophone brethren/neighbours.

So when Anthony Morgan-types - 25-year olds who are more aware of U.S. culture than their place of residence's - take their Blackberries out to take a tribute to a great champion (in this case Usain Bolt, but it also happened last year for new hockey hero P.K. Subban, arguably the most-liked player on the Montréal Canadiens) and twist it to make it look like a whole school is guilty of mass racism, I can't help but elevate my voice in anger. And sadness.

Because where do you draw the line? Sporting the Jamaican sprint team's colours is ok, a wig would be alright, but no face paint? But you can paint your face in an Indian head and go see the Atlanta Braves (or Cleveland Indians, or Chicago Blackhawks, or Washington Redskins for that matter) because those are the team's colours? It's still face paint, usually involves the 'redding' of the skin, harks back to the quasi-extinction of an entire race of people by colonialists? Why is one considered ''cheering for'' but the other one is ''making fun of'', in this fucking day and age, more than 100 years after the fact, A FACT THAT DOESN'T EVEN GO ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE TRADITION OF SHOWS IT ''REPRESENTS'' in the collective minds of a few?

They were disguised as Bolt; when you wear a Jason or a Freddy mask for Halloween, you don't disrespect the character, people likely wouldn't recognize it if you didn't. Same goes for this JOYOUS fucking occasion of tribute and fun.

Anthony Morgan: learn your fucking history. Jesus was black, so was Cleopatra. And never were any races collectively abused in this province be it by the system, the laws, or major entertainment networks.

And Brandon Sun: you call yourself a newspaper? Shame on you for printing the story in a way that makes a whole school - the most respected of its kind in Canada - and, by affiliation, the 7 million people of the province of which these are the future elite, look like a KKK rally of retards. Then you wonder why we want out of your country. That belongs to another country's queen.

I'd been in a relationship with the (now-former) Lady Of The House for a year, and it was my first trip away from her. It was smack-dab in the middle of my two weeks, sleeping in Trois-Rivières at night and working in a field in St-Tite by day, counting the cars passing by on the highway - a lonely, boring job if there ever was one.

Every day, we'd wake up around 6 AM, get to the hotel's dining room by 6:30, leave for work around 7, come back around 7 PM.

But on that day, the news was on: a plane had accidentally crashed in one of the towers. And, half an hour later, the other plane crashed and it was now clear this was premeditated. With all the world's news cameras watching, live, showing the despair, people jumping out of windows, others suffocating in the street. Reports soon flocked in about 4 highjacked planes and everyone on TV had their opinion about what was going on, and what was going to happen.

And yet the shuttle to take us to work was there on time, and we hopped on it, confused, disoriented, some numb. It was hard to believe World War 3 may have begun and yet we were about to carry on as we would on any regular day.

On the other hand, what choice did we have? We weren't directly involved in anything, and the world around us was still happening, shit needed to get done.

But when we arrived in St-Tite, it was a strange spectacle: many of the homes there, in Québec's one true cowboy town, had American and Canadian flags in their backyards - an extremely uncommon sight in our parts - and the American flags were at half-mast, signifying a national tragedy.

And yet people were going about their business: bull-riding competitions, horse shows, selling merchandise, food, jewelry. Stepping in horse shit. It was surreal. Unreal, even.

How could the world go on now that nothing was ever going to be the same? Then again, how long did it take before we just kept doing what we'd been doing anyway, and the only thing that ever changed was that each day, we'd have more rights and freedoms taken away from us. That, and bearded, tanned fellows were getting a harder time than ever before.

But nothing else really changed.

And that's why I'm pissed off about the wall-to-wall, week-long coverage of the memorials.

''Never forget'' is something everyone should deal with on their own, in their own way, not a stupid fucking catchphrase to be repeated ad nauseam on every news channel, in every publication, on commemorative plaques and plates - and especially not t-shirts.

It's not something a political party should have the right to shove down our throats, especially if they keep blocking support for the first responders any chance they get, usually mere minutes after parading an NYPD cop or NYFD fireman in front of a camera.

Wearing a flag pin or driving a car with a flag bumper sticker doesn't actually do anything for anyone either; you're not ''more supportive'' of the victims than anyone else, and ''supporting the troops'' doesn't help in this particular case either.

Flying planes in building was a political act, not an act of war. ''Never forget'' is aimed at the innocent victims - not ''first and foremost'', but ''only'' , and the consequences of the attacks (two ten-year wars... and counting) mean very little for the friends and families of those who perished.

''Where were you/I/we on 9/11''? I answered that already. But more importantly: where are we now? And where will we be in the future? And how exactly is the world we're shaping a tribute to the departed?

We should have been busy making a better world to live in, one in which events like those from ten years ago wouldn't be a daily possibility. Instead, we used 3000 useless deaths as an excuse to kill over 150,000 more.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Spinnerette is the most current project involving Brody Dalle (of The Distillers' fame), in which she lets her past punk sound behind and instead experiments with more of a pop sound.

Her studio band usually consists of guitarist Tony Bevilacqua (a.k.a. Tony Bradley in The Distillers), Alain Johannes (Queens Of The Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures) and my favourite drummer, Jack Irons (Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eleven), while her live band is a revolving door of whoever she is interested in bringing along at the time.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

I just had to be writing about a puppy killer one day and dumb criminals the next, and now it's come to bite me in the ass. Well, Steven Seagal more than me, considering he killed a puppy when the tank (!) he was driving through a suspected cock-fighting den's owner's house as he was accompanying the town sheriff for the benefit of a (possibly failed) reality TV show.

And now the Arizona resident is suing the cop, the actor and the show.

Gotta love these plot twists where the alleged criminal ends up turning the tables around, forgetting he's the one that started it all...

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Single people are getting more and more desperate to find ''the one'', so much so that many have abandoned dating websites altogether and opted for Facebook instead, where they can have access to whatever others don't make 'private' on their pages.

The people pictured above linked up on the said site and the man, Adam Minton, conveniently left out he was a cokehead with debt problems, while the lady, Leah Gibbs, forgot to mention she was an idiot.

Is a band allowed to move on after their singer's death? According to The Doors (two-thirds of them anyway) and Alice In Chains, yes.

Add Sublime to that list.

And clearly they want to separate the new band with the old one, because they're actually calling themselves Sublime With Rome, a smart move, because it shows a clear departure from the former singer to the new one. The band remains 'Sublime', but the leader is now Rome, who does a decent enough job at the old songs and doesn't entirely suck at writing new ones. Much better than what plays on the radio or music television these days.

A Facebook friend from Connecticut posted this link on her profile today, a blog post by Chris Durant about football player Michael Vick.

First, a who's-who: Michael Vick is a star quarterback who spent 21 months in jail and 2 months of house arrest after being involved in a dog fighting scandal, for which he was found guilty of financing the gambling aspect of the operation, participating in dog fights, and participating into ''6 to 8'' dog executions.

Chris Durant is a diva actor who has walked out halfway through a season of a TV show and hasn't really done anything since a few cameos in 2009. Less cameos than extra work, really. Oh, and he models on the side because he's pretty. He now has more blog posts about Michael Vick than he does about his acting in a TV series.

And in yesterday's interminable post, he pretty much recaps his hatred of Vick by calling him:

a diseased human, a sadist, a user, and a fraud.

''User'', of course, because Vick tested positive for marijuana, which was a violation of his conditions. Pot. Maybe it's because I live in a real city, but weed, man, really?

As for ''diseased'', you can take it as ''in the head'', but I think Durant refers to Vick's genital herpes condition, which is something he got from someone else at some point - because that's how these things spread. Some may see he was a victim in this case, but since he did transmit it to at least one other person, I wouldn't go that far myself.

''Sadist'' because the man killed dogs. And not quickly, some by hanging. He went to jail for it.

And ''fraud'' possibly because he doesn't buy Vick's remorse.

Then he goes on and on about Vick's treatment of dogs, in graphic detail sure to turn your stomach over before going on a rampage, attacking everyone remotely connected with paying Vick (his team, the Philadelphia Eagles, his sponsor Nike, ESPN) or anyone who has accepted his apologies (Congressman Jim Moran, Humane Society CEO Wayne Pacelle) all in a holier-than-thou tone that implies ''if you disagree with me, you hate puppies and you should die a horrible death''.

I was raised to think for myself in a system that believes a crime deserves a punishment, but once it's done, the individual can be given a second chance. Harder times for harder crimes, sure, but even murderers, rapists, pedophiles and terrible actors are allowed to try to turn their lives around.

Take both of your hands. Make a circle, kind of how Spock tried to do in the picture above.

That is exactly the size my asshole felt when I passed the craziest gas this planet has ever witnessed earlier today. And it lasted for roughly fifteen seconds, it was cold-ish, and it felt like I was deflating.

I just thought you should know, before the ozone layer completely melts away.

Writer, mostly, in mediums diverse and similar: musician, film-maker, poet - not the bad type, nor the pretentious type. It's more that I suck at everything except producing words and shouting ideas at people. Oh, and I'm the guy who brings you UnPop Montreal yearly, helping the little guy get a voice in this variety-deprived city.